Molly Peacock, Toronto poet and editor, responsible for getting the new series Best Canadian Poetry in English off the ground, read from her new poetry collection, the second blush(McClelland & Stewart, 2009), a collection she described as a series of “mistakes,” before going on to compliment particular lines by the previous two authors (including McCann’s “that badunkadunk tongue”). There was something odd about the theatricality she utilized while reading her poems, something that the host later claimed brought an element into the writing, subverting and not undercutting the subtlety of the poems in her collection (she talked about previously doing a “one woman show,” and the theatricality of her reading suddenly made a bit more sense). Writing a more metaphor-driven narrative verse, I wasn’t entirely sure how to enter her poems; I still haven’t figured it out, but there were some pieces there and here that I quite liked. Is it worth getting to know further of her collections, apart from this only one?

Our Minor Art

We make love better unobserved—not thatwe’d ever throw the new cats off the bed.We let them sit there, turning their backs,but listening anyway. We don’t move in bedquite with the freedom we might without them,but the fact that they stay is like beingvisited by minor gods. And we love the minor.It inspires us because we like beingclose to its genius—something we might cometo understand beyond our human boundsbut near to our kind—not like the major,a capitalized God, for instance, oruppercase Art. Those are beyond us,yet our transformation here in bed is art,something best made unobserved, even by the cats,who leap off as we forget them and ourselves.